US Race Riots

All lives matter

﻿﻿There is some really frightening and awful stuff happening in the US at the moment and I am not even talking about Donald Trump. The Black Lives Matter campaign was thrust back into the spotlight when two more men were fatally and inexplicably shot by police. Footage of the events went viral, prompting demonstrations across the country. At one of these demonstrations, five police officers were fatally shot and another nine wounded by Micah Johnson who was armed with an assault rifle. ​With racial tensions right now at boiling point, this is a really delicate subject that people should be a little careful with their language around. A lot of Americans will be sickened by the country’s inability to curb racial violence. Many of those same Americans and others will be equally horrified at a deliberate attack on police officers who serve them.

It is both unfair and counterproductive to link Johnston with the Black Lives Matter campaigners (who to their credit have condemned his actions unconditionally), just as Dylan Roof didn’t represent Christians or Omar Mateen represented Muslims. He was an unhinged individual acting out his own rage. It is also not helpful to suggest Johnston’s actions were directly attributable to the police killings in Louisiana and Minnesota earlier in the week. While such events probably contributed to his state of mind, this was not a rational or acceptable response. This was murder and terrorism and since I don’t believe it is in any way justifiable I am not going to treat the events as if there is any causative link.

But I do have a couple of points to make.Firstly being a police officer in America must be a very hard and at times terrifying job. The prevalence of gun crimes makes every interaction with the public dangerous and the existing racial tensions add another layer of fear and uncertainty. Not only is it a difficult country to perform the job of police officer, it is also a massive country with over a million police officers. In any sample that size, even allowing for extensive testing or applicants, you are bound to get a range of personality types and skill sets. And some of these officers are in the wrong job. Being a cross-section of American society, there will be some blatant racists and others who don’t think of themselves as such, but who have a heightened threat response around blacks. There will also be others who are not at all racist, but who just panic when they think they are in danger. It is important not to equate the worst of the force with the whole force. But for that to happen, the police forces must properly deal with the officers involved in incidents such as those in Minnesota and Louisiana.

Having watched all the footage I could, I believe the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile cannot go unpunished. It seems difficult to argue that either victim constituted much threat when they were killed. Of course the level of danger can be a subjective quantity and the officers involved obviously had to make their decisions in real time under high stress. If they escape criminal charges for this reason, it would be hard to justify their continued employment on the police force given their decision making.

But even allowing for the fact that officers such as those that killed Castile and Sterling are not representative of the whole force, something is still going wrong at the macro-level when we see events like this. The Black Lives Matter campaign has an important message, but they need to deliver it carefully, especially in the wake of Dallas. Right now it is being delivered in a blunt and angry manner, which I do understand , but which is a little unfair to the thousands of police officers who serve their communities fairly, proudly and courageously.

The police are not the enemy and, in fact, provide a critically important function, but they need to respond too. The over-representation of African Americans in jails and in police shootings is a bigger problem than just policing. It is also related to failed social policies, poor education and systemic poverty. But the nation’s police agencies also need to look inwards with brutal honesty. They may need to change some of their policies or they may need to clean out some undesirables in their organisations.

I don’t want to use a tragedy to push a political message, but I can’t finish without mentioning US gun laws. As I said earlier, a climate where anyone can obtain a gun makes policing more dangerous and frightening. A number of police shootings have occurred based on misunderstandings or panic about the sight of a gun (kind of ironic when you consider self-protection is one of the arguments gun enthusiasts give against gun control laws). A last point about gun laws: The Dallas shooter was again armed with the type of assault weapon that is banned here in Australia. Do I need to say anything else? Maybe just this:All lives really do matter and every unnecessary death is a tragedy.